Student Suspended for Refusing to Wear a School-Issued RFID Tracker | Hacker News Reader

Student Suspended for Refusing to Wear a School-Issued RFID Tracker

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A judge has granted her a reprieve [1] based on freedom of speech and freedom of religion grounds. The student claimed it violated her religious beliefs. I don't begrudge anyone the right to practice their religion, but I do wish it had been based on her right to privacy.

[1] http://dailycaller.com/2012/11/22/christian-student-wins-rep...

Privacy is not a legal right in general, beyond some particilar subclasses like searches and seizures.

Perhaps it ought to be?

No, it's there, just not explicitly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griswold_v._Connecticut

That's a general error, such as claiming there is no right to travel, or freedom of movement in general. You have the "sense" of rights backward.

The reason internal passports would be unconstitutional in America would be that the restriction of freedom of movement is not a power delegated to the federal government. That's why in the BoR it has words to the effect "this is not an exhaustive list of your rights."

I respectfully disagree. Although, this only refers to the government...well schools are government too lol...but you know what I'm getting at, I would think that whether it's the school or the government would yield no major differences in the outcome.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012)

...Although if the device only tracks around the school and not 24-hour...that's another layer to be considered. Very complicated matter from a legal standpoint. As for my personal ethics, I'd tell my daughter to take it off.

Why? Would you tell your daughter not to sit in her assigned seat when they take attendance?

Many people believe that privacy is a fundamental human right. The UN lists it in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

There absolutely is a right to privacy. See the earlier response about Griswold v. Connecticut. I see people frequently saying privacy or things are not rights because they are not enumerated in the Constitution. Please note, however, the Ninth Amendement:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

In other words, the people have rights other than those in the Bill of Rights. Courts have determined a number of rights that are not in the Constitution, among them the right to privacy, often based on the fact that people have reserved that right and not been denied it in the past. Some people, for instance, believe that, while the individual right to bear arms is not in the Constitution, there is a strong Ninth Amendment case for it[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_keep_and_bear_arms#cit...

The Row v. Wade decision inferred a constitutional right to privacy within the 14th amendment. If this right exists, then it makes no sense to limit it to specific subclasses.

> Row v. Wade

I believe that's what anglers fight over.

(It's Roe v. Wade, as in Richard Roe, John Doe's old friend, a classic fake name used by the courts for various purposes. In this case, it was used to protect the identity of the woman seeking the abortion.)

It's interesting to note that "Jane Roe" of Roe v. Wade revealed her identity just a few days after the trial ended. She later became a high-profile pro-life activist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norma_McCorvey

> I don't begrudge anyone the right to practice their religion, but I do wish it had been based on her right to privacy.

As much as I dislike it, most of the times when you are on someone else's playground, you have to play by their rules. When the govt. comes at you saying "internet needs to be censored because who will think of the children", making up another "think of the children" argument has more mass appeal than talking about how free and open is good.

> Like most state-financed schools, the district’s budget is tied to average daily attendance. If a student is not in his seat during morning roll call, the district doesn’t receive daily funding for that pupil because the school has no way of knowing for sure if the student is there.

So if this is all there is to it, why not just have a swipe-in and swipe-out at the main gate? If a student has swiped-in, he has entered the campus. Swipe-out will be just an assurance that the student didn't swipe-in and leave immediately. And is some students are concerned that it's still a smart card and can be used for tracking, or they really don't want it on religious grounds, have a biometric system(thumbprint or retina). That will be cheaper than giving everyone an RFID card.

A biometric system is cheaper than RFID readers?

Not by a long shot.

The simple reason they don't have kids swipe in and out is because they simply won't do it. You can get employees to do it because they are paid. Not only that, but it would create foot-traffic jams at exits.

RFID is just a better solution that is equivalent, from a data gathering standpoint, to the solutions you put forward.

> A biometric system is cheaper than RFID readers? Not by a long shot.

Aren't thumbprint scanners commodity hardware now-a-days? Say a school has 700 students. It's 700 RFIDs vs may be 20 thumbprint scanners.

> The simple reason they don't have kids swipe in and out is because they simply won't do it. You can get employees to do it because they are paid. Not only that, but it would create foot-traffic jams at exits.

As for kids not doing it, doesn't US schools have any attendance norms? Schools in India have generally a 75% attendance norm.

I used to work in an office with a headcount of 20000. Though people came in at different times, I am pretty sure the number of people who came in at 9 is greater than number of students in an average school. Swiping in and out didn't create any jams.

> RFID is just a better solution that is equivalent, from a data gathering standpoint, to the solutions you put forward.

Data gathering is what I am, and looks like the student is opposed to. I see anything more than ensuring that the student came in is a serious violation of privacy. The solution I proposed was in response to school's excuse of ensuring attendance to get funding. Ensuring attendance and tracking at all times are two very different things.

Thumbprint scanners are inaccurate unless you get into the high-end range. If there is a commodity fingerprint scanner for that many students, they could install a single button and get equivalent data.

Why not use the RFID tags to "swipe" in and out (e.g. just have a reader at the entrance), rather than tracking their exact location across the whole campus?

Upvoted. Readers at the entrances sounds like a good compromise.

That is exactly what this is. It is not tracking exact location. They are talking about readers at entrances and exits.

Sadly reporters and all the privacy people forget to mention this. They make it seems like they are tracking their EXACT location.

>As much as I dislike it, most of the times when you are on someone else's playground, you have to play by their rules.

It's too bad they aren't my kids -- I'd just let them homeschool on the computer all day.

I do hope you realize there's a ton more to successfully homeschooling your kids than just letting them on the computer all day...

Is there? I definitely learned a lot more from sitting on my computer at home than I did from public schools.

Perhaps your idea of knowledge is limited.Communication skills? Dealing with people different from yourself? Dealing with people you actively dislike? Conflict resolution? Dealing with a power hierarchy? Learning how to navigate complex administrative systems and bureaucracies? Learning how to learn? Learning self-discipline? And then there's the fact that self-schooling really is quite ineffective when compared to being tutored properly, and utterly dependent on the student being able to grasp difficult concepts without outside help...

Not going out of my way to defend the superposter since he worded himself into a cornere, but if someone were to be teaching oneself online that is learning to learn and learning self discipline.

Also, I don't think kids "learn" anything about communication, dealing with people, etc in public school settings. They all devolve into tribal hatemachines filled with bitterness and animosity for one another. They aren't learning how to be good people in that situation. I acquired all of my social skills after school hours with friends that lived near me, because in school every child is a vile vindictive monster if they can get away with it. That should be clear! They don't want to be there, and the vast majority were like me in hating the process.

But I didn't learn a lot of those things from public school either.

I was surrounded by middle class white people very similar to myself, with a few black people here and there. No Asians, no Hispanics, etc. And yet strangely I wasn't confused or inadvertently insensitive when I eventually did encounter people of other ethnicities. What is there really to learn there, other than don't be a dick?

A few of the items in your list apparently assume that being homeschooled also means never seeing any other humans outside your immediate family, which is preposterous. There are always extracurricular events, church events, family friends, neighborhood kids, etc.

The worst item on your list is "learning how to learn." I smiled when I read that, because of the implication that doing busy work every evening is preferable to self-motivated browsing of Wikipedia and the Internet. I contend that the opposite is true.

> And then there's the fact that self-schooling really is quite ineffective when compared to being tutored properly, and utterly dependent on the student being able to grasp difficult concepts without outside help...

Of course I agree with that, but it's essentially a tautological statement due to the inclusion of the word "properly." The fact is, of the dozens of teachers I had in public schools, there were maybe 3 that actively helped me understand a difficult concept. There are easily twenty times that number of people who have actively helped me understand difficult concepts in programming, mathematics, philosophy, and computer science via my self-initiated communication on the Internet (mostly via forums and IRC).

Besides the points laid out below, homeschooling isn't merely teaching your children what you think they need to know. My experience has only bee with Michigan and Texas, but in those two places the government requires that homeschooled students report to approved testing facilities every so often for standardized testing to prove that the teacher is covering the materials that are mandated to be taught.

If you read the article, what the school is trying to accomplish is to locate students that are on campus but not in class for first period to force them to show up in first period.

The reason is that the school's funding is based on the number of kids marked as in attendance in first period.

So your suggestions wouldn't work for what they want to accomplish because they need to locate a student anywhere on campus at any time so they can send someone to that location to find them.

> If you read the article, what the school is trying to accomplish is to locate students that are on campus but not in class for first period to force them to show up in first period.

The article reads:

But with the RFID tracking, students not at their desk but tracked on campus are counted as being in school that day, and the district receives its daily allotment for that student.

They are counted as being in school; they don't have to be at their seats per the article. Won't swiping in serve the same purpose? If somebody is swiped in, he is counted in.

When I was at school we had a paper register which was ticked off by the teacher every morning. Anyone found wandering around school during registration would have been punished.

Low tech, but it worked.

Most important part of the article: "What’s happening now is going to spread across the country," Whitehead said. "If you can start early in life getting people accustomed to living in surveillance society then in future it'll be a lot easier to roll these things out to the larger populace."

That's kind of how it happened in UK with the CCTV cameras, I think. I don't think that future generations will be bothered by them anymore, unless the Government does something terrible and oppressive with them and the people find out and revolt about it. Then they might be up for discussion again, and someone who opposes them could get enough political support to remove them.

I'm not sure if I oppose CCTV cameras or not. Sure there's a creepy element to it.

OTOH they are all in public places and the footage is not released to the public without some reason (in contrast to basically anyone just recording with a phone).

People always say they want more police on the street, so if each of these cameras was replaced with a uniformed policeman watching the street would this be better or worse?

> People always say they want more police on the street, so if each of these cameras was replaced with a uniformed policeman watching the street would this be better or worse?

Better, unequivocally. Why wouldn't it be?

I mean specifically from a "civil liberties" point of view, i.e your are being watched either way but CCTV happens to be cheaper (though less effective).

I meant my comment from the "civil liberties" point of view too. CCTV leaves a permanent record, accessible in perpetuity and to the authorities only. But if a police officer were on the street instead, public activities would remain pseudoanonymous so long as he's not paying attention or what you're doing doesn't otherwise stand out as important to the cop in the moment.

Because cctv cameras are not (at present) armed and thus can't kill innocent people. Nor are they racist and thus they can't beat someone close to death thereby starting riots.

And that's real, trained, qualified, experienced, officers. Imagine what it's like if you have people like the UK "Special Constables" (PCSO, Police Community Support Officer) - volunteer police with limited powers (and training). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_Community_Support_Offic...)

Police on the streets probably aren't much good at catching criminals; from the little I've read there needs to be more detectives but not more beat officers.

PCSOs are not volunteers, they are paid. Special Constables are volunteers.

PCSOs generally do not have any more rights than any normal citizen in terms of arrest etc and therefor don't really have grounds to make threats against you (apart from using their radio to call an actual police officer).

Special Constables are properly trained, qualified and warranted volunteer "real" police officers.

PCSOs are paid, barely trained normal citizens with a police-like uniform.

More police mean more people. More people mean more mistakes. And when police make mistakes people die or at best go to jail unnecessarily. Law enforcement is entrenched with a stand-your-ground-to-hell-with-the-facts culture.

Their job is essentially to find "bad guys" so when there are many more cops then bad guys, the category of bad-guy gets vastly expanded.

In 2002 at LAX there were so many cops it was ridiculous. My friend got a ticket for littering and I got one for jaywalking. Actually he was going to arrest me at first.

So yes, please, I want that experience everywhere I go. If I walk briskly, well then I should be stopped and questioned. If I stop slightly ahead of the line at the crosswalk, I should get a $500 fine every time and eventually lose my license.

But the police of course can simply turn on their sirens and go through whatever red light they please, or park in front of a hydrant, or on a sidewalk, they are above the law after all.

This overreaching police state sounds simply wonderful. Where does one sign up?

Police need to be convinced that your oppresive dictatorship is a good thing. Cameras wont revolt.

The history of military recruiting, and even police recruiting, shows that this check is a non-issue. Police departments hire power tripping bullies who enjoy harassing dirty/brown/hippy/communitst/Irish/whatever.

I don't know more than half-a-dozen policemen but none of them fit that description.

Right. 6 people in your anecdotal experience is a good rebuttal when compared with thousands of years of world history where there have been no problems finding people to do awful things. For the most obvious example, go to Germany in WWII.

No idea why the grandparent is being down voted.

>6 people in your anecdotal experience is a good rebuttal //

No, it's not and we all know that. That's why I phrased it that way. However it does falsify the [apparent] claim of it being a universal truth, for me - obviously you'd need to weigh my trustworthiness as an observer+reporter for it to count as evidence.

Specific to my statement and your rebuttal. I only know about the current UK police's history. What's the earliest police force and how do we know they hired sadistic sociopaths?

I don't think the point was that every policeman was a jackass, or even a majority. The point is, that throughout history, anyone with power has been able to convince a lot of people to do their dirty work. Likely many of these people weren't even bad people, they just didn't have the courage to stand up for what is right.

It doesn't falsify anything, and I have no reason to believe you aren't trustworthy. I just need to be able to provide lots of examples where the opposite is true, and I can. It's trivial.

I don't for a second believe that every German soldier in WWII was as bad a person as Hitler made them be. I do believe they were willing to go well past what most people would admit to doing, likely because they were afraid they'd die if they didn't. But millions of jews were slaughtered because it wasn't that hard to convince people to do it.

Not everyone is an asshole, or on a power trip. But there has been enough instances of cop brutality. The more people you add, the more the number of bad apples increase. Having more people might dilute the percentage of bad apples, but it still increases the number of bad apples. And as another commenter pointed out, when there are lot of cops on the street, and there are no conventional bad guys, the definition of bad guy extends. I certainly won't want to be arrested for jaywalking.

That's a pretty strong stance you are taking. To suggest that policeman trump cameras unequivocally, well, you'd have to ignore history to make that case.

Just reading through various threads here and I see examples of cases where cameras solved problems better then people could have.

Is there not any other ways to stop violence than with threats of violence (like more police and cctv who will make sure the cops gets you if you do crimes)? A better, but harder way, is to design society so that crime is low because it's not as necessary as it is today.

History is littered with designed societies.

History is littered with societies in general.

The problem with CCTV cameras is camera footage can be processed automatically to track people's movements. This gives the state more power than it reasonably needs.

Good point. But OTOH what if some private organisation (cough google) decided to pay private property owners to put street facing cameras on their buildings, record everything and upload it to some server?

This could then be used for all kinds of purposes but AFAIK they wouldn't be breaking any laws in doing so, so in this case it doesn't give the state any extra rights than a private company has.

You're once again believing the ridiculous notion that somehow all CCTV cameras feed into a central state monitored control station. They don't.

Note the use of the words "can be". What's the trend of modern states? Is it towards limiting or increasing surveillance?

I don't want more police in my neighborhood.

At first, more police would probably improve a few things. Fewer people would litter, and the occasional drunk who passes out on the side of a street would be removed faster.

The trouble is, there's not actually much for extra police to do, so they'd eventually find things to do. They'd have to start writing speeding tickets for 5 mph over the limit and picking up stray cats. That kind of enforcement would not make this a more pleasant place to live.

"start writing speeding tickets for 5 mph over the limit and picking up stray cats"

Aren't those good things? I wish for someone to get a ticket if they drive faster than the speed limit, they're a hazard to themselves and others. I'd like stray cats to get picked up so that they will get taken care of and won't be a nuisance to the neighborhood.

I completely disagree. Speed limits are not based when someone becomes a hazard to himself or others. A great many people can and do safely travel faster than the speed limit. Also I don't think that stray cats are a nuisance, and that they do in fact keep down the rodent population and are a generally healthy element of the urban ecosystem.

If you are in the US and want more cops in your community, you can make it happen by convincing enough people to vote for the necessary tax increases to hire more law enforcement. Alternatively, you could move to a gated community, many of which hire security guards, that you pay for, who will help take care of the stray cat problem - but you'll still have to contend with the speeders outside the gate.

Those might be good things in some cases, but usually not. In my area, stray cats are mostly beneficial and not overpopulated. Speeding by such a small amount is not usually dangerous, and drivers paranoid about overzealous speed enforcement are likely to focus too much attention on the speedometer and not enough on their environment.

They're good things, but are they good enough to justify taking money from people by force (taxation) to pay someone to do them? Pink lemonade is good too, but I prefer a society where people who want pink lemonade choose to buy it for themselves.

I don't want either. I'd prefer more people took care of themselves. An armed society is a polite society.

"An armed society is a polite society."

Do you really believe this platitude? On a purely logical level, there are so many counterexamples that one has to be embarrassed to state it as fact.

I do. Please show lots of examples of people with their HCP committing crimes.

Look at Switzerland. Do they have huge mass murders happening on a daily basis?

I'm still waiting on your counterexamples, but in the mean time here are a few links.

In Switzerland, most 20-30 year olds are in the militia, and have automatic assault rifles in their homes. After their service, they are made into semi-automatic rifles and generally kept by the servicemen in their homes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Switzerland 2006 - 34 gun killings, 7.6mil population - rate of killings or attempted killings with firearms at about one for every quarter million residents yearly

DC - poster child for gun control, had 137 gun killings last year with a population of 600k. http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/11/18/effect...

In Australia, we've decreased to about 0.1 gun homicides per 100k: http://guncontrol.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/1995-200... (Note: somewhat biased site)

That's compared to 0.22 for DC, or 0.04 for Switzerland, so it's still higher than Switzerland with vastly higher gun control. However, I think that it's more about the surrounding gun culture than it is the laws: most Australians are against gun usage (see the response to the Port Arthur massacre or the Monash Uni shootings), whereas for Americans, it's their right to hold arms, and they seem to defend that adamantly.

See also, this opinion piece by our former Prime Minister: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/brothers-in-arms-yes-...

Edit: http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/australia notes 30 gun-related homicides in 2008 for a population of ~21 million.

That's not a counter example though. Having a place with gun control that isn't full of gun crime isn't that shocking, though it hasn't worked in the US. What you need to prove me wrong would be one without any gun control that has huge lawlessness and gun crime compared to similar places with gun control.

>An armed society is a polite society.

Is the subtext of this statement "An armed society is a polite society because rude people get shot"?

No. It's that criminals think twice about robbing or raping someone if they know they are armed.

The Swiss then do not count as an example, what with them not actually being armed in any sort of public-ish space.

You only get robbed in public?

Mostly

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/c...

30% was at home, which is over 100k.

Which is kind of surprising considering that possibility of home owner having a gun is mentioned as strong deterrent for criminals.

>No. It's that criminals think twice about robbing or raping someone if they know they are armed.

Then wouldn't a more appropriate aphorism be "An armed society is a safe society"?

My personal complaint with CCTVs is, "why are they so hidden?" I understand that in a public place (shopping mall, public park etc), people could be watching me. I'm alright with that simply for the fact that those people watching me are themselves subject to the same condition of being watched. CCTVs are often black on very dark wall/ceiling or very reflective against a light wall/ceiling making them very hard to pick out unless you are looking for them. It wouldn't be surprising to me if some of them are even more hidden (embedded in decorations, wall hangings, toys, mannequins etc). To me, some of these CCTVs are effectively an attempt at being robotic peeping-Toms.

I think a CCTV would afford more real security (if it does at all to begin with) by following the norms of a real watchman (being visible).

tl;dr I think I have right to watch the watchmen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%...), even though this is not guaranteed by any law.

If the police feel that hidden cameras are the way to go, then they should surrender the protection that claim to have (not being allowed to videotape or otherwise perform surveillance on a police officer). (I am not at all sure about this last part, please correct me should I be wrong).

edit: replaced <em></em> with *s

It's probably way cheaper with cameras..

Some studies point that operating cameras is expensive and in some way just move or change crime, therefore less efficient than real police at the same cost.

Please don't peddle the "UK CCTV" bullshit. It's simply not true.

CCTV in the UK is widespread in large cities, but operated by individual shop owners, and has been since the 80s when cameras became cheap enough. There is no big government CCTV operation. Closest thing is probably the London congestion charge cameras, or individual towns who decide to install their own to cut down on crime.

And if you go out of the cities, you can go forever without seeing a CCTV camera.

I'd like to expand on your point. There seems to be a misconception that most/all cctv cameras are operated by the government. Currently, and nearly all cameras are owned and operated by private parties, and such as shop owners. No one but the owners have access to the footage from these cameras, and and in fact most are set up to record to static media (tapes or hard drives).

Nothing more than anecdote, but hey:

My Yorkshire village has a playground. They installed CCTV last month. More people complain about the main road changing from a 40mph to 30mph. I don't care if the 'they' is government or centralised or whatever. The numbness to surveillance unsettles me greatly.

What do you think they're doing with the CCTV?

They're almost certainly recording to a VHS tape, which cycles every couple of days.

IF some crime or vandalism happens on the playground, they will then grab the tapes, and check them. The chances of a conviction will be far higher with video evidence.

It's not "numbness to surveillance", because it's not really surveillance.

If you want to be free to take videos and photos of random places/things without being arrested, you should also allow that same freedom to owners of property who want to reduce crime.

I think an important realization is that the public is not generally okay with CCTV installations when they find out they are the recycling VHS type. They are okay with them by default, and don't even bother asking.

I suspect that if you stop random people on the street, point to a camera, and ask them "What kind of camera is that?" the most common response will be along the lines of "I don't know, who cares?" These would presumably be the same people who don't pay CCTV cameras any mind in their day to day lives.

It is not that people don't mind because they are recycling VHS cameras placed by private citizens, but rather that they just don't care regardless. The fact that there is a widespread myth that all the cameras are government installed and networked actually drives home this point. People incorrectly think this and they still don't really care.

That's right. Because the number of instances of "My life was ruined by the state who monitored my every move", or "My love life was ruined when my wife was able to bribe the CCTV operator to find out about my affair"... they don't happen do they.

If CCTV was a problem for people, we'd hear about it. But it's not, so we don't.

The fact I visited a certain shop is on record for 2 days on a crappy VHS tape.... why do I care?

Some tourist probably also took my photograph, but I'm not going to stress about that either.

Nobody, as I read it, is suggesting that the current CCTV installations, or even the imagined CCTV installations, present a threat themselves.

The damage being done, in my opinion, is a shifting of the Overton window. It changes our perception of normal so that other hypothetical, actually dangerous or sinister, developments will not seem as unusual or outside the norm.

There is not a massive tracking network of CCTV cameras today, but people seem to have the idea that such a thing exists.. and they don't care. Give it a few more years and you could probably actually install such a system and the only people who said anything would be considered weirdos for caring, just like you find it weird that people are bothered by the current system.

I should emphasis that I do not think the UK is going to turn into East Germany in any foreseeable future.

As I say, we've had widespread CCTV in shops in the UK since the 80s. In the last 30 years nothing has particularly changed.

I take your point, in theory an evil genius prime minister could install some mass surveillance system. But what the hell would be the point? And the chance of him not getting found out and called out by the media is negligable. Add to that the utter incompetence of government to do anything IT related, and I think we're pretty safe.

As I said, I don't think there is any immediate danger posed by CCTV systems in the UK. You could say I am "concerned" in a largely academic manner.

Your point is not academic... there is this new thing called WalMart, er, Asda. Ever hear about it? Cheap stuff for people with bad taste. Oh, and with a side of live-video-surveillance-with-active-facial-recognition feeding a worldwide db which has implicit (subpoena or court order... or not in cases of foreign nationals) access by the NSA / FBI / CIA. Um, and people are cool with it why? Because its all on VHS and has been going on since the 80's. I believe that is what you were saying...

If it's feeding a database, it ain't a 2 day tape loop!

Why would you imagine it is VHS and not hard drive?

Because at the time it was installed, that was the cheapest option.

> They are okay with them by default, and don't even bother asking.

I think it's even stronger.

I for one am not ok with lack of CCTV installations as in:

"They (stole my bike/slashed my tires/robbed my office) and (there was not a single camera to record this/image from only available camera was so crappy that it doesn't help)."

Coincidence, but I was from Yorkshire and the village I grew up in put a CCTV camera on the community hall to view the playground as it had gotten to the point that a couple days couldn't go by without someone finding a dirty needle. Once that camera went up, the junkies didn't go there anymore.

A camera is far more cost effective to the parish council than sending someone to search for health hazards every morning.

I take your point, but there was a little local difficulty in Birmingham UK recently with Police operated CCTV with car number plate recognition.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/oct/25/birmingham-cctv-mus...

Of course, CCTV simply pushes street crime away from the central areas.

>CCTV simply pushes street crime away from the central areas //

I've heard that argued for many years but never seen the stats. Do you have a reference for us?

Good challenge - mixed results...

"Mixed findings: Birmingham 14 CCTV cameras in the city centre in the early 1990s failed to reduce overall crime levels. However, recorded crime statistics indicate that CCTV reduced robbery and theft from persons, whilst incidences of theft from vehicles rose. The CCTV system was not designed to target vehicle related crime and so was not installed in many car parks. There was some displacement of crime to surrounding areas. Surveys of the public before and after CCTV installation found little change in general feelings of safety for those using the city centre during the day. Nevertheless, for those using the city centre after dark there was an increase in feelings of safety amongst those aware of the CCTV cameras. It is not clear whether these effects were a direct result of CCTV as the area was also redeveloped at the same time."

from http://www.parliament.uk/post/pn175.pdf

The source cited in that summary in reference [3] is no longer available at the Web address given but is available from

http://library.npia.police.uk/docs/hopolicers/fcdps68.pdf

pages 40 to 57 of that second reference contain a detailed discussion of some statistics from 20 years ago in Birmingham city centre, a location I know well. Once sentence on page 50 seems to suggest displacement of street crime to car theft, only as a suggestion. However the whole section gives you an idea of how hard it is to be definite about displacement or reduction in a city centre subject to shifting building patterns and traffic routing.

Thanks. I'd imagine that there would be a noticeable shift in reported crime from areas of higher CCTV concentration to those [local] areas with lower CCTV concentration. It seems that there were no particularly clear displacement effects in the case-studies in that first doc¹.

The second doc² appears to make no clearer claims on displacement either.

Mind you we've 17 years more data now and there must be several areas where CCTV has been installed, removed (or deactivated) and possibly reinstalled.

There really must be better citations than this around. I've no time to dig for them now but these don't convince me that displacement is, if anything, more than a minor effect. Moreover those docs show a shift from direct personal robbery/theft to theft from vehicles; I'd expect that would result in less bodily harm overall at the expense of broken windows and bent door frames, probably a good result.

- - -

¹ http://www.parliament.uk/post/pn175.pdf, 2002

² http://library.npia.police.uk/docs/hopolicers/fcdps68.pdf, 1995

What you describe is the privatisation of CCTV. Yes it is owned by the likes of shopkeepers, but all of it is accessible by the state on demand. So I'm afraid its not bullshit at all. Its just not owned by the government. That should be nice and safe, right? When you get don to it, its rather clever.

That makes a huge difference though. You have to go out and talk to people and ask for tapes. That ownership structure makes many automations very hard which is a good thing. Routinely scanning for suspicious activity? Nope. Automatically follow a single person from one camera to the next? Nope.

> Yes it is owned by the likes of shopkeepers, but all of it is accessible by the state on demand

Yes, if they walk into the shop with a warrant and ask to see their tapes. They can't track us all walking around in realtime, which is a huge distinction.

I worked on the original 1990s UK CCTV research.

The UK CCTV is widespread in large cities and operated BY THE POLICE FORCE. It is also on most major roads: look for the blue cameras.

CCTV does not 'cut down crime' in fact it does the opposite: it increases crime by a small but measurable effect.

> CCTV does not 'cut down crime' in fact it does the opposite: it increases crime by a small but measurable effect.

Do you know why CCTV increases crime?

I am not doubting your argument. I am militantly opposed to 1984esque surveillance. I am just curious.

My guess, and I share your attitude towards surveillance, is that installing CCTV cameras increases crime in the same way that broadening the legal definition of rape "increases" the number of rapes.

That is to say, more things are counted than before. Although CCTV cameras may not help solve crimes (I don't know if they do or not), perhaps they make it easier to count crimes.

Pretty much spot on.

It's fairly simple.

A crime is just a crime statistic. The more police you have the more crimes are recorded so crime goes up. CCTV is like adding an extra cop (sitting in front of 30 cameras).

CCTV generally does not deter any crimes but it acts on the the kind of crimes that are usually ignored: mostly public order offences linked to alcohol.

CCTV operators spend their nights following couples and women hoping to see sex acts. Occasionally they spot someone urinating against a wall and call the cops.

Urinators, drunken vandals, soliciting prostitutes are seen and logged where they would mostly be ignored—crime goes up.

Did you just try to argue that CCTVs actually cause more crime because "cctv records more crimes so crimes go up".

I don't particularly like CCTVs but this is terribly weak reasoning however you try to twist it. This is akin to me arguing a new cancer test actually causes cancer because we now detect more cases of cancer.

There is more subtlety in my comment than that.

Most people and politicians generally do not understand the difference between a measurable statistic and a physical event. Often in the eye of the law and the lawmakers there is none. Everything you know about crime at a macro-level is actually knowledge of a crime statistic.

Millions of pounds of CCTV cameras were sold on the back of my study that showed a 33% drop in crime that was in fact caused by the simultaneous removal of one of the three police officers patrolling the area. A subsequent study that took this effect into account and showed a 3% rise in crime was buried so as not to embarrass the politicians who ordered the expensive equipment.

Usually a rise in crime is statistics while a fall in crime is good policing. Similarly, politicians call for a 10% drop in cancer deaths but never tell us which death-rates they want to go up to compensate.

> Do you know why CCTV increases crime?

1. See "Perceived security compared to real security" at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security

2. CCTV moves the community's mindset on a crime/non-crime level - "You are (or not) a criminal", "You are a suspect until proven the contrary" (aso.) - and this generates thoughts which aren't always good ones ranging from curiosity/challenge ("wh/if I'll try to overcome this...") till repulsion. An educational way of keeping the criminality rate low is way better than "Big Brother" way. Note, that I don't preach Anarchism here but another way of community management. The force and surveillance must be in the background.

The blue cameras on main roads are for congestion tracking.

ANPR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recogni...) is a big mass surveillance operation.

"The UK has an extensive (ANPR) automatic number plate recognition CCTV network. Effectively, the police and security services track all car movements around the country and are able to track any car in close to real time. Vehicle movements are stored for 5 years in the National ANPR Data Center to be analyzed for intelligence and to be used as evidence."

"What we're trying to do as far as we can is to stitch together the existing camera network rather than install a huge number of new cameras," - Mr Whiteley chairman of the ANPR steering committee said"

Uh, in Central London I count at least 6 operated by the council or Met or Transport for London (unclear actual ownership of the outdoor ones but they're mounted on public poles and accessible by Met for criminal investigations). This is a short commute. Seems rather pervasive that I'm tracked visibly for about 70% of the distance covered on foot.

Central London is a massive city. Obviously there's a shit-ton of CCTV there. It's in no way typical of the UK though.

Noone in the UK cares about CCTV, I certainly don't and my friends don't either. The average person in the UK is seen 300 times per day[1] on CCTV and the number is probably higher now.

CCTV in the UK is essentially completely privatised anyway & thats even considering that the government run cameras to track car plates etc. Similarly, the government can request that the shop keeper etc hands over the CCTV footage but seriously who cares?!

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2071496.stm

Sticking my foot out - Panopticons are not a bad thing. They're actually a really good thing, because they, theoretically, let you get a lot more security without losing a lot of liberty (instead, you lose privacy).

The problem people have - universally in my limited experience - is with the people and institutions behind the cameras, not the cameras themselves. If CCTV is Big Brother, isn't neighborhood watch something like Little Brother?

<paranoid>Within a surveillance society, however, most of the effort involved with the loss of liberty is taken care of by the loss of privacy. Once you can track someone's whereabouts constantly, in realtime, and gain access their communications, know where they've been, where they plan to be, what assets they have, and who their friends are, ending their liberty becomes a minor exercise in telling the black vans where to be and when.</paranoid>

>Sticking my foot out - Panopticons are not a bad thing.

East Germany is a historic example of why surveillance states aren't a positive thing.

>If CCTV is Big Brother, isn't neighborhood watch something like Little Brother?

Neighbourhood watches aren't centralized and funded to the degree that state surveillance is.

> East Germany is a historic example of why surveillance states aren't a positive thing.

Street CCTV is not the same as a microphone hidden in your light switch, without you knowing about it. Not nearly the same thing.

The ability to eavesdrop through cell phones, even where they're not making calls, is pretty similar (although probably more effective) to the capability of bugging light switches:

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1029-6140191.html

Street CCTV can augment traditionally eavesdropping intel, tracking movements and, from that, extrapolating relationships and activities.

I'm not even sure what this thread is about anymore, sorry. Passive CCTV is one thing. Massive spying on unrelated civilians is another. Bugging criminals' phones if you have a warrant is yet another. I don't believe any reasonable discussion can take place if you throw every possible reason and means of recording anything into one bucket.

There are different uses and different situations. People can have different opinions about them too. I believe for example that CCTV is exactly as legal as anyone taking a photos / movies of the police for example (and the other way around), while bugging phones by law enforcement needs to be very tightly regulated. But those scenarios should have very little in common.

>I'm not even sure what this thread is about anymore, sorry.

The thread started with someone positing that panopticons aren't a bad thing, hence the mention of East Germany (a low tech attempt at a state panopticon) and segued to discussion of the modern state's surveillance capabilities in comparison with East Germany.

>I believe for example that CCTV is exactly as legal as anyone taking a photos / movies of the police for example (and the other way around)

They both fall under similar laws, yes, but the big difference between ad-hoc amateur surveillance and centralized, automated surveillance is the capability of realtime analysis of location, association, etc.

> Passive CCTV is one thing. Massive spying on unrelated civilians is another.

By that you seem to be implying we don't have both

It seems you don't get security from cameras.

http://www.aclunc.org/issues/technology/blog/san_francisco_s...

We must negotiate with nosy, judgmental primates for food and shelter. "Liberty" to ruin my life is meaningless; I can't actually do or say anything sufficiently controversial without privacy.

Students need the lanyard to use the library or cafeteria, vote in school elections,

I graduated from high school nearly 10 years ago, we had ID cards with magnetic stripes. I graduated from college with some additional voluntary coursework four years ago. We had cards with magnetic stripes and QR codes. Both worked in the function of identifying the student, and swiping in the mess hall as currency. Quantity wasn't a problem even with a student body count of nearly 5500 in a high school, our student numbers started with 0000 and were (iirc) 18 digits long.

So here's my question: why was RFID aggressively pushed if tracking wasn't an explicit understated purpose, when there is tech perfectly capable of performing the duties outlined?

I would guess most of the vendors of these types of systems are going RFID. Magnetic stripes are fragile, as anyone who's had their visa de-magnatized can tell you. They are also perceived as "less secure", as anyone who knows anyone who's had their visa card "skimmed" can tell you.

For these reasons alone, RFID is where the puck is going to be. Then on top of that you add in you can sell institutions on tracking packages and analytics software and all that crap? I'm sure you can still buy mag-stripe versions of all this, but the people who do this are probably pushing RFID hard.

I would guess most of the vendors of these types of systems are going RFID

Actually this makes sense, didn't think of that way. However, comparing security issues of credit/debit cards with student ID badges doesn't work; I'm not suggesting they don't exist, but on the whole are less likely in the setting we're looking at.

I was mostly thinking of the perception of security. Everyone knows you can clone a mag-stripe card cheaply and easily.

I assume you can do the same with RFIDs (and you don't even need physical access to do it, right?) but I think people assume they're safer.

You'd be surprised - when I was at college there was a student who was caught skimming ID cards, duplicating them, and selling them on (for access to various areas and also for payment, since our ID cards were used a declining balance cards). They switched over to RFID shortly afterwards. I'm sure this has happened at other colleges too.

And whilst this sort of thing is almost certainly less common than card fraud, the potential consequences are actually far more serious. If someone skims your credit card it's inconvenient, but hopefully your bank will cover the loss. If someone skims your ID card in a college environment where ID cards typically let you into controlled areas like dormitories and labs you've got a big problem.

You'd be surprised - when I was at college there was a student who was caught skimming ID cards, duplicating them

But in a high school? Not that I'm disagreeing with you; but in high school the incentive seems to be much lower to forge ID cards. Maybe I'm just crotchety about this whole thing and am projecting to find whatever reason I can to dismiss the idea of forcing tracking on kids.

RFID is the future. Magnetic cards were a problem waiting to be solved. They wear out, have to be big enough to comfortably swipe, and are easy to copy.

Credit cards, door locks, train tickets and anything with a magnetic swipe or barcode will eventually be replaced with RFID or similar.

The tracking part, however, is optional.

RFID chips are fragile in different ways (try holding three in front of a reader at once). When NFC enabled chip and pin cards first came out (and RFID enabled e-passports for that matter) came out, there were concerns that these cards could be skimmed from hundreds metres away as opposed to skimming requiring the card being placed in a modified payment terminal.

> there were concerns that these cards could be skimmed from hundreds [of] metres away

Why is that no longer a concern?

I would certainly be concerned about it.

Even if the cards can't be cloned from a distance, couldn't they still be tracked from a distance? Could the school actually be helping stalkers follow students unobtrusively?

It is, and the cards still can be cloned. You just need a big enough antenna.

See: http://hackaday.com/2012/05/27/reading-rfid-cards-from-afar-...

+ I recall someone else building a big antenna that allowed to read cards from range of meters.

Reminds me of the "bluesniper", which was basically a Yagi antenna on a rifle stock, meant for sniffing Bluetooth devices from a distance.

It's debatable. Some steps have been taken to mitigate the impact (foil envelopes for your Passport Card, basic shielding on e-Passports, the introduction of MiFare DESFire as an alternative to MiFare Classic) but AFAICT it's still possible to skim the cards remotely. There was a period of time when these concerns were all over mainstream media (especially in Canada and Europe, during the migration to Chip-and-PIN, particularly for credit cards) but you don't see it often these days (except in extreme cases like the one in this article).

RFID chips are fragile in different ways (try holding three in front of a reader at once).

Mind sharing what exactly happens, before I have to explain why me and two co-workers suddenly need new ID cards?

Scrambled message so the reader can't recognize them.

To be fair, skimming is and likely always will be an issue with RFID as well, unless there are low power microprocessors in the card that generate unique keys that are somehow syncronized with an external database...maybe someone with more experience can weigh in on this?

I would imagine existing cryptography could work. Each card could have a unique private key, and the public key would be associated with the students ID. At this point, someone can verify a card is who it says it is by asking the card to encrypt a randomly generated message. Assuming we are using the method I described (as apposed to a crypto-system optimized for identification), the card would only need to be able to encrypt 1 block (probably 512-bits) for each identification. This seems quite doable.

You don't even need cards with magnetic stripes or QR codes. These are relatively modern inventions. Schools did just fine without them for millenia. I went to school without either, and the school managed to serve their student body just fine.

This obsession with tracking people's every movement and action, and the surveillance state built to satisfy it is really disturbing and pathological.

"Schools did just fine without them for millenia."

Yeah, they did fine without grades stored in a database, too.

This is simply a way to take attendance in a more efficient manner. Would you rather a teacher spend 5 minutes out of every class taking attendance or use a more efficient automated system.

These things don't track every movement. They track whether people have walked through certain doors or not...

The obvious counterargument: When I was in primary school, we used paper and pencil cards to track items which were borrowed from the library. Why were barcodes and magnetic strips aggressively pushed when there was tech perfectly capable of performing the duties outlined?

Part of me thinks forcing this on a child is insane. Part of me realizes that I already have agreed to monitoring of this sort in fragmented ways: HID RFID badges to get into my residence building at university and into buildings during work terms; NFC for payments and my transit fare card; Google location history on my phone.

I imagine its a third systems engineer maximising profits/suckered into buying it, a third RFID manufacturers aggressively trying to consume marketing share and a third the proportion of people in the world who are really creepy and should stop spying on people.

Its unwieldy for most purposes in addition to the privacy concerns, but I'm reticent to go all Alex-Jones-fly-off-the-handle hysterical about this.

Corruption's always a possibility -- maybe the RFID provider is owned by a school board member's brother-in-law, or maybe they've paid off the right people.

But we don't need to assume malice where mere incompetence will suffice. I can easily see technologically illiterate school officials being wow'ed by slick company salesmen. Since too few citizens really care about local politics, it also isn't a stretch to think that nobody who realized the implications attended the school board meetings where it was discussed and approved.

By the time things get as far as they've gotten in this situation, the plan's supporters can't back away from the plan without losing money and face.

I graduated from a Catholic high school of 1200 ~7yr ago that in my last year actually used a similar RFID-tag system for the doors (was already using plain bar-codes for the cafeteria). AFAIK the (stated) purpose was access control; RFID makes a bit more technical sense simply to keep the doors from backing up or bar-codes getting muddied up (not that it kept the things from breaking continuously anyway). No one ever raised a fuss (not to say I personally agreed).

I went to a high school with metal detectors, reinforced doors, armed guards, dogs, cameras, central electronic locking, road and pedestrian checkpoints, and, yes, ID badges. As a high school student in the late 1990s, I was more closely monitored than your average prisoner.

So my takeaway from the article is pretty specific: Bullshit. Carrying a school ID badge with an RFID chip on the school's campus is no great injustice. It's trivial compared to the routine degradations inflicted on a public school student.

Somehow, this makes it to court, while the routine problems are ignored. It's OK to treat students like prisoners, right up until new technology is involved. The RFIDs are the scary part, not the guards, weapons, bars, and locks.

As a counterpoint to you and someone that went to high school at the same time in the US. I experienced none of what you did.

My high school was in a wealthy area with ~4,000 students. Economies of scale apply.

When this becomes the "standard of care" at smaller schools, you'll just see other budgets slashed to provide these dubious "services."

Mine had 1600 students and probably a higher median income and none of those things. I would guess problems of crime have more to do with this than economic status or size.

> My high school was in a wealthy area with ~4,000 students.

That "standard of care" you experienced seems more appropriate for an inner city public school than one in a wealthy area. Food for thought.

Same here. We had mandatory ID cards, a school police force including a drug dog, regular locker searches (which regularly turned up drugs), trouble for students that didn't attend including suspension and not passing, etc.. I read the article and really don't see it as any different from my old school requiring us all to have our IDs constantly. So it has an RFID instead of a number to read off. Big deal.

Where are these schools where these things are allowed and encouraged? Seems like it would be extremely expensive (in terms of money and student/teacher time) and disruptive to learning.

Midwestern suburban paradise. Median income for the school district is $52,000. That's enough higher than the surrounding county that they can afford quite a lot of expense and disruption. It was certainly not driven by poverty or crime.

I'm sure it's worse now, 15 years on.

This reminds me of this case where the school was spying on students with the camera of the laptops they loaned them. Seriously, what are these people thinking? That 1984 was an instruction manual?

It brings to light once again what fucked up incentives/goals schools are pursuing, if it's not the safety/privacy of their pupils.

I remember when my high school installed surveillance cameras and a friend wrote an article, "Masses of Apathy", for the student newspaper about how it was so passively accepted. The principal of the school wrote a response scathing him for what amounted to disagreeing about students' privacy. Unsurprisingly, the cameras are there to this day.

Although I'm not pushing religion on anyone I feel like it should be mentioned that the religious ground she mentions might have something to do with this part of the Bible:

"He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead." Revelation 13:16

> "Other non-believers think John was a bit too fond of funny mushrooms and shouldn't be taken too seriously."

This kind of remark, regardless of author's beliefs, doesn't sound like a very good journalism style. (Also I guess it's a reference to Pantheocide from Salvation War series, http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Salvation_War)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tech_tabloid

So, the journalist maybe didn't say it respectfully, but there is a strong possibility in there.

John was originally proselytizing in Rome, but the Romans got pissed off at him, so he was exiled to the island of Patmos. Amanita Muscarias grew on that island! And if you read trip reports (or, trip yourself?) you'll find that Amanitas give very extreme religious imagery.

So if you compare the imagery from modern day Amanita trips with what was written in revelations... you realize that it's very possible that St. John was writing a trip report. And because of that day's lack of understanding about drugs and those experiences are produced, he would chaulk it up to a message from God.

## edit: more links http://www.erowid.org/plants/amanitas/

http://www.erowid.org/archive/rhodium/pdf/amanita.muscaria.r...

However any references to amanitas or mushrooms are not in the wiki article for the Book of Revelations.

Are the school's administrators similarly tracked? Does the principal wear a badge around their neck?

Can students use a directory to see where in the building their friends are, or where to find a particular teacher?

I wonder if a surveillance society could work if everyone was allowed access to the information.

Opt-in systems seem to work better. Twitter, foursquare, facebook, etc. would be pretty terrible if they were government mandated.

wonder if a surveillance society could work if everyone was allowed access to the information.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG0KrT6pBPk

tl;dw -- it does.

I think the thing that annoys me the most about this, is the money. We constantly hear from politicians and their constituents that we should spend more on education, that our students don't compete well with the rest of the industrialized world and more money will solve that problem, despite the fact that we spend more per student than anyone else -- and then this is what they turn around and spend it on. And they are spending it on things like this without showing us any need for it. And will they ask for money to improve education in schools in the next elections? Yes they will.

(Jumping ship from the other link to the same story)

Success metric fail.

Then again - What is the success metric for education? Attendance is (IMHO) pretty terrible, and standardized testing hasn't worked out the best - so what is it?

A classic answer (but still, probably not all that great of one) is jobs upon graduation - but that doesn't help in elementary school.

So, how would you go about turning such long-term metrics as "employment in ten years" into short term metrics, to figure out what to do next week?

Despite plenty of attention and funding, test scores continue to get worse. It's pretty clear that we have no idea what the solution to the education problem is. So it makes the most sense to try as many different things as possible until we stumble on a solution by accident.

So let every school try their own thing. Publish long-term metrics. Let parents choose where to send their children.

Standardization and centralization of school funding are part of the problem at this point. Tests are great at measuring -- until they become standardized and high-stakes, at which point the pressure causes teachers to start spending all their time "teaching to the test."

Also, many people have an incorrect assumption that every child has the same destiny. The very name of Bush's education masterpiece, "No Child Left Behind," implies that you'll dumb things down to the level of the worst student in the class. High school career counseling often pushes college on students who simply aren't cut out for it, while perfectly honorable but less prestigious life destinations, like the military or skilled trades, are starving for new recruits.

Given that technology is supposed to increase efficiency (meaning fewer can do the work of more) I'm not sure that jobs are a great measure of educational success, or even the ideal goal of education.

We've seen the transition from almost all of society being involved in primary production to a small minority working in "big agriculture". Broad swathes of industry (construction, manufacturing, transport & logistics) being replaced by machines. Why do we assume there will even be a demand for labour which meets the needs of 90%+ of the population in 10 years time?

Often the counter-argument raised to this point is that "other jobs" will replace those which become defunct through new technology - instead of someone picking the crops by hand, they will maintain the harvesting machine. It seems to me there is a natural ceiling on the amount of productive work available before people simply end up rent-seeking/extracting value without creating anything in return - ie. trading futures on those crops, suing one another for selling dubious financial products which benefit no-one, and acting as social media liaison officers for the agro-business, financial services firm and law firm in question.

In my view optimising the education system to produce these outcomes (and then congratulating ourselves when everyone is gainfully "employed") misses the point by a fair margin.

It seems pretty clear to me. The success metric should be some combination of parent and student satisfaction.

"...and it allows the school to track their every movement throughout the day." Seriously, is this necessary?

If you work at any big company, or any company with a secured office building, you have to wear or carry some sort of RFID badge, sometimes two. If you drive across a toll bridge or down a toll road, you need an RFID sticker on your car. You carry RFID cards to use public transit or Zipcar. I don't know what my point is, except that this kind of thing seems like part of the modern world, and it's not that strange to see schools implement it.

How do cameras prevent truancy better than taking attendance?

taking attendance doesnt allow you to boast about how you are being proactive. It also isn't a reason to ask for a big budget increase.

It's less about ensuring that students are at school, but ensuring that they are counted. The school district receives funding from the state dependent on attendance. That's what is meant in the article by "it's all about money". With the cameras and now RFID, they can record that the student is on the premises even if they are not in the homeroom for attendance taking. (There are legitimate reasons a student may miss roll call.)

I graduated from that school last year and I totally agree with her decision about refusing to wear it not her justification. In case anyone is wondering John Jay only exists still due to a magnet school called John Jay Science and Engineering Academy. The magnet school boosts test scores and attendance to a acceptable level for the state. This RFID Tracker is one last attempt at saving the school from being shut down.

Cameras connected to cops and it's being paid out of the educational budget?

The direct quote:

> The school has already installed over 200 CCTV cameras in an attempt to curb truancy, some of which have a live link directly to the local police department, Whitehead said.

I can't even begin to... this is... I have no words.

Sounds like a prison system

Is a reeducation system but beginning at the same time as education. Orwell must be proud.

Personally, I like this one too (from http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/11/cctv-cameras-sch...):

> More than 200 schools across Britain are using CCTV cameras in pupils' toilets or changing rooms, according to figures obtained by anti-surveillance campaigners, who warned that the research raised serious questions about the privacy of schoolchildren.

> A total of 825 cameras were located in the toilets or changing rooms of 207 schools across England, Scotland and Wales, according to data provided by more than 2,000 schools.

[...]

> Responses from 2,107 secondary schools and academies showed they used 47,806 cameras overall, including 26,887 inside school buildings.

That's an average of 22 cameras per school, so clearly there is progress to be made, but cameras in the lockers and bathrooms must be worth more points.

Pedo bear approves...

What a complete waste of money. It's as if they actually expect the cops to sit down and continuously monitor all 200 cameras all day. Horrible waste of tax money on two fronts.

Also, say some cop does happen to see a kid walking out of school at 1:30. It's not like he's going to get all alerted and call the school to figure out the situation. No he's going to think "There goes some kid ... probably called out by his parents" and that's the end of that.

Of course this means they just need to spend more money on more technology.

You have to start integrating the cameras with face recognition, RFID chips, and of course you have a system that knows when every student is SUPPOSED to leave. (Of course, this necessarily means both a permanent record and live feed of e.g. every student's medical appointments will be created.)

And then of course if there aren't enough officers to monitor the cameras continuously, that means you have to increase taxes to hire more officers. After all, they're American heroes, being strong and brave to protect the innocent -- we all need to do our bit to support them. And think of who they're protecting in this case -- the children! Everyone's concerned about the welfare of children...

HN, this is why I hate politics.

I don't see why we're so uptight about children's safety anyway. Sure, some get kidnapped and murdered, or molested or beat up or whatever, but 99.999999% of kids seem to do okay. Sure, it sucks if your kid is one of the .0000001%, but there's a lot of things that suck in this world if they happen to you, but they are so uncommon that we don't (and shouldn't) waste any time worrying about them.

Lol. Because a life isn't a statistic.

Expressing concern for childrens' safety activates the "child-in-danger = I'd-better-do-something" reflex that evolution's built into us.

Therefore, politicians, marketers, and other "spin" people who want to build support for a certain agenda will say "We need to do this to protect your children." Because it works -- it convinces people emotionally, if their reasoning capability is poorly developed or not engaged.

Most people are statistically illiterate; they don't understand probability. And our intuitions about this sort of thing were evolved when news spread by word-of-mouth; they do very poorly in an age where everybody hears about very rare events thanks to worldwide radio, TV and Internet coverage. Bruce Schneier has a very insightful essay on this topic [1].

[1] http://www.schneier.com/essay-401.html

The privacy violation here is clearly of the second order. It is not the position of students which is private, but what can be inferred from their positions in aggregate. Your position data combined with data that you don't have can often say a lot about you.

Part of me is fascinated to see exactly what you can infer from the data. Can you detect drug usage? Sexual activity? Perhaps even some psychological problems like anti-social behavior?

Should parents want perfect information about what their kids do, even if just at school? Does the impersonal nature of this data's acquisition and inference erode the sense of connection and trust between a parent and child?

Although my own reaction to the news of the RFID policy was visceral and negative, I have to admit I sort of want to do the experiment and see what happens. I suspect that, as usual, the result will not be what anyone predicted.

At best I think you can infer who eats lunch in the cafeteria or who enjoys going to the library.... personal behaviors like drug use and sexual activity couldn't really be inferred without other sources of data.

Trigger the parking lot sensor == drugs. Bleachers == sex.

Proximity to known offenders, etc.

Where are they going to put the close proximity bleacher sensor? The parking lot sensor?

These things are not good with open spaces. I suppose they can re-design things to reduce the points of entry for these places but I doubt it. Especially considering that you can defeat it by removing your lanyard temporarily or giving it to your friend that is going to the library.

I would be somewhat more tolerant of "required to wear RFID badge" if it were done for safety purposes -- for instance, to maintain accountability over a group 5-6 year olds, or on a trip, or if someone was "special needs" (emotionally/mentally disabled) and prone to running off.

There are lots of advantages of RFID/NFC over magstripe or 2d barcode, even for simple applications like cafeteria payment -- faster reads, and the readers themselves are far more robust.

Issuing the cards with an RF shield envelope pretty much solves legitimate complaints. It turns it from a passive monitoring technology to something active, and it's maybe ok to require people to badge-in to get access to places with expensive or stealable assets -- badge into the computer lab, library, etc.

The problem here is the way the school is funded. The reason that the school put forward is that the school's funding is based on the number of kids marked as in attendance in first period so they are using this system to increase those numbers by locating students already on campus but not in class.

So root cause here is the funding model. That's what needs to be changed. Funding should not be based on a variable number of students that happen to be at school on a given day. There are a number of fixed costs in running a school that the current funding model doesn't take into account.

So if you're pissed at this you should be more pissed at WHY they implemented it in the first place.

Not wearing an RFID badge later in life will severely restrict this student's employment prospects, as they are very prevalent in many workplaces now. Would be interesting to know if her parents have to wear RFID badges where they work.

The student refuses to wear the id even with the tag removed. Can someone explain to me what she is protesting against?

Why shouldn't schools know where the students are on campus and when students enter and leave campus? Attendance would be much better if parents could be called immediately when kids leave campus to skip. Kids could be kept safer since its harder to get away with violence with a log of everyone's location on campus.

The problem is that this system doesn't work. If a kid wants to skip school, she'll just give her friend the her tag to scan.

It's even simpler than that. All this card can offer is a system for tracking when and where it's scanned. Being a very short range technology, unless they make all doors/exits RFID only, they can still simply leave and noone would be the wiser.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4819877

Unreadable, prevents pinch/zoom.

Are there FF Addons to acccount for that level of (insert swearword)? I cannot even begin to imagine why anyone would think that this is a good idea. Wired, really?

Edit: To answer my own question: Yes, the addon 'Always zoom' fixes utterly broken and annoying sites. Like this.

Related news on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4819832 (94 comments) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4819877 (12 comments)

Wear it, but not before putting it in a microwave oven for a minute on high.

The Hernandez family, which is Christian, told InfoWars that the sophomore is declining to wear the badge because it signifies Satan, or the Mark of the Beast warning in Revelations 13: 16-18.

Not this shit again.

this is not that different than the suspensions we'd receive for not wearing identification lanyards introduced my senior year in high school.

it seemed absurd even before the introduction of RFID. on one hand, this seems more absurd to me. on the other hand, this is a public school, where your privacy is limited anyway.

do the privacy cons really outweigh the security pros in this case? i do realize the general arguments presented in security vs privacy. but i wonder it's not any different if we're talking about children in a public institution?

Imagine what will happen when bullies and other predators figure out how to track people with it.

The US government doesn't have a right to know where you are at all times, but the guardian of a child does have that right, or so I thought.

What's wrong with that?

USA really needs to implement the EU's Data Protection Directive....

They already track our mobile phones - what's the big deal?

This would be so much more interesting and supportable as a privacy issue. Instead the first upholding of this policy will be in the face of religious superstition and will tarnish future attempts to resist or address this policy.

This is infuriating to me, as I fought the precursor to these policies when I was in highschool to the point that I had organized a protest with enough people that I was basically threatened until it dissipated. Now, more than ever, we treat our schoolchildren EVEN MORE like prisoners except that we still spend far more on prisoners than we do our education for our youth...

"I feel it's an invasion of my religious beliefs," she told InfoWars. "I feel it's the implementation of the Mark of the Beast. It's also an invasion of my privacy and my other rights."*

FTA. I get that it's popular to automatically dismiss something when you catch so much as a whiff of religious overtones, but the student did in fact also mention privacy as an issue of why she refused to wear the badge.

My point was merely that complaining about the "Mark of the Beast" is a good way to get people to roll their eyes. I certainly think this policy is a horrible precedent but ultimately I think a secular redress involving something that could actually be upheld would be a better focal point.

This, "my religious belief is as good as anyone elses" is a can of worms, a dangerous discussion and will derail from the immediate problems with these policies. They turn places of education into centers of control and survelliance. There is so vastly much wrong with treating humans like this, let alone students, that I cringe that criticisms will be dismissed because of the particulars of an individual's religion.

(Aka, I agree with you, my fear is that this being a religious issue rather than a privacy issue will be over all detrimental to actually fixing these policies. Hope that explains things more.)

Point is valid and taken, however the comment made here[1] actually makes the counter-point I was preparing to after reading your response. Essentially, sure-the lean towards religion is slowly moving back in the other direction towards pragmatic and progressive thinking; does not mean we shouldn't give it consideration when we (I, not sure about yourself but definitely the case in the expelled Texan student) live in a country that has a founding document that explicitly cites religion as a guaranteed freedom.

===

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4820028

Ok, let me get this straight.

School makes RFID solution for tracking/library/food stuffs. Student objects based upon religious and privacy grounds. Judge granted her a reprieve based upon Freedom of Speech and Religion grounds.

I do have a good deal of knowledge and understanding of different religions and beliefs. I know of none other that specifically mentions the "Mark of The Beast" and the full context mentioned in Revelations.

So are they preparing a non-Christian tracking service?

I don't think that we can say these people are trying to create a non-Christian tracking service. I doubt they are acting with (that extreme a degree of) malice.

That doesn't change the fact that the effect, regardless of intent, is approximately the same.

I think a sensible way of handling religious exemptions, to prevent giving special privilege to those with more restrictive religions (or those with religions more open to loose interpretations, or simply those with religions), is to permit anybody of any religion or lack of religion to claim religious exemptions that anybody else could.

If a Christian student is allowed to opt-out of the RFID system, then a Buddhist student or an atheist student should similarly be allowed to opt-out, even though they lack the "mark of the beast" stuff in their belief system.

I would concur as well. I believe they were doing this RFID system for 2 reasons: the students, and the contract. However, the reprieve allows all Christians to exempt themselves from this program.

My underlying worry is the Government will make further all-encompassing rules on the hopes that few are able to be exempt from them. This will be done by a religious test in front of a Judge.

However, it is all the worse that this occurs at a secondary school. With the rule of in loco parentis, it really is a dictatorship and a prison. At least outside that compulsed system, there is more regular rule of law.

Thankfully religious exemption only kicks in for things that ultimately are pretty trivial (DMV photo requirements, for example), or in limited settings (such as schools, where as you said loco parentis is in effect).

There are probably a few counterexamples, but the only ones I can think of are historic. You can now claim conscientious objector status in the event of a draft for non-religious reasons, though this was not always the case.

Actually, (and this surprises me greatly I must say) the US Selective Service System would serve as a great example for how religious exemption in other situations should work.

From http://www.sss.gov/FSconsobj.htm :

>Beliefs which qualify a registrant for CO status may be religious in nature, but don't have to be. Beliefs may be moral or ethical; however, a man's reasons for not wanting to participate in a war must not be based on politics, expediency, or self-interest. In general, the man's lifestyle prior to making his claim must reflect his current claims.

I quite like that; seems very reasonable to me. If all religious exemptions were reworded into something like that, I would be a very happy man.

No politician or judge in Texas who likes their job will ever roll their eyes at this accusation.

If this general issue were limited in scope to Texas, then I wouldn't be concerned about anyone but judges in Texas.

That she was able to effectively use a (honestly, kind of nutty) religious argument is great for her, but I don't think it does the rest of us much good. If this becomes a trend, I could definitely see it ultimately being marginalizing.

This is fundamentally a privacy issue that could effect anybody, but if the only effective arguments against it are religious exemption then what we have created is a situation where you are only free to exempt yourself if you can effectively form an argument against it in your particular religion (if you even have one...).

That is not a situation I am comfortable with.

The religious angle is explicitly protected by the constitution. Privacy, not as much. You're rights to privacy relate to religion, privacy of your home to house soldiers, privacy against unlawful search and seizures, and the 5th amendments protection of incriminating yourself.

> That is not a situation I am comfortable with.

For better or worse, that's how the most powerful law in our land is framed. And, while you might not like it, it might have been the smartest thing our founding fathers did. After all, what's to stop people from establishing a religion founded on certain beliefs of privacy?

Consider that while you can argue for privacy, arguments for tracking could be made. And while you might hate the "think of the children" argument, it's a very real issue for many.

Personally, I'm happy with the situation, that the case can be challenged, and while religion might be apart of it, it's privacy that is at stake, and everyone knows it.

You just have to ask yourself: does your belief in your right to privacy trump someone's acceptance of being tracked?

>For better or worse, that's how the most powerful law in our land is framed. And, while you might not like it

You have misunderstood me almost entirely I fear.

I am perfectly fine with religion providing exemptions, what concerns me is that privacy seems to have been effectively dismissed here, in favour of a religious exemption argument. That is fine for the people involved, but I do not think it sets any sort of useful precedent for the rest of us. Atheist, Buddhist, or other non-Christian students presumably still have to fight to opt-out of this system, but now Christian students (clearly the majority) are effectively exempt.

> After all, what's to stop people from establishing a religion founded on certain beliefs of privacy?

Well, a few things. First off, religions invented or employed to take advantage of religious exemptions tend to be poorly received. A few people have tried to wear spaghetti strainers in their DMV photos as "religious headgear", and generally I believe they eventually win the right to do so, but they have to go through lengthy and draining fights just to gain access to the same exemptions that more mainstream religions would receive automatically (when was the last time a Jewish person had to fight to defend the legitimacy of Judaism in order to wear headgear in an official government photo?)

Secondly, even were the process of inventing religions to gain access to religious exemptions streamlined, this ignores the possibility that the individual already is religious, and religious in such a way that claiming an additional religious affiliation is out of the question for them.

Thirdly (and very related to my second point, to the extent that it probably doesn't require individual mention), it ignores the possibility that the student is opposed to religion, and wishes to obtain the same consideration that Christians are being afforded, but has a moral opposition to lying about one's religious beliefs. Telling that student to lie, invent and "adopt" a religion, and then only then enjoy the same protection, is I think unreasonable.

There is a very easy solution to my uneasiness however that still allows students to make the (very easy) religious exemption case: Allow everybody, no matter their "claimed" religion (whether genuinely held or not), to take advantage of exemptions that would or could be afforded to other religious students. If Christian students are permitted to exempt from anything, non-Christian students should also be permitted to exempt from the same thing, without having to find a non-Christian basis for doing so.

Stated more clearly, nobody seeking religious exemption should be expected to claim affiliation with that, or any, religion.

If that were the case, both in the letter of the law and in practice, then my uneasiness would be entirely calmed.

EDIT: if "religious exemptions" were handed out with the same stated standards for conscientious objection from the US Selective Service, the result would be quite similar to what I earlier proposed and I would be entirely satisfied.

The part I quite like: "Beliefs which qualify a registrant for CO status may be religious in nature, but don't have to be. Beliefs may be moral or ethical" -- http://www.sss.gov/FSconsobj.htm

The majority decision for Gillette v. United States 401 U.S. 437 (1971) is not one that I particularly like, however its broadening of eligibility beyond strictly religious beliefs is quite good, and I think very relevant.

> I am perfectly fine with religion providing exemptions, what concerns me is that privacy seems to have been effectively dismissed here, in favour of a religious exemption argument.

No, I understood you perfectly. What you seem to think is that privacy should have played a more important role, despite their being nothing in our countries history to suggest otherwise.

> privacy seems to have been effectively dismissed here

No, it hasn't. This is wrong from every angle.

First, it has not been dismissed here. It's apart of the case.

Second, it's not even the strongest point to stand on. Our constitution does not protected against privacy, but religion.

Thirdly, this is not special to this case. It did not start here. It started with the foundation of our country.

You then proceed to make some arguments that basically say you can start your own religion if this matters to you, you might already be religious (and I assume where your religion does not believe in protecting your privacy), and that someone might lie about being a Christian to afford them the same rights (ignoring the part about creating or establishing your own religion).

> The majority decision for Gillette v. United States 401 U.S. 437 (1971) is not one that I particularly like, however its broadening of eligibility beyond strictly religious beliefs is quite good, and I think very relevant.

Religion is merely a coded set of beliefs. That you would be okay with this ruling but against religion being used is... well, hypocritical. They are tantamount to the same thing. In either case, belief is being held above privacy. Heck, even this ruling understands this similarity.

Regardless, your point basically amounts to: I don't like that the girl used religion first and privacy second while ignoring law and the girl involved.

And yet, with all you say, you completely ignore the fact that privacy still would not be the first issue.

In the end, I think you are just hiding your real stance: you are against religion regardless of what it does. Your "being disappointed about a belief structure being above privacy in this case" is a lie.

>something that could actually be upheld

Are you implying that the First Amendment (ie: religious freedom) is not something that can or has been upheld in court?

I understand the concern you voice, however in doing so you come across as so intolerant of religion that you're unwilling to even consider working with religious people when your goals coincide. Moreover, you seem to think that only one legal strategy is correct and only one legal strategy can be exercised at a time in order to challenge a rule or a law. I sincerely hope you represent the minority of HN and that most users are much more tolerant and inclusive.

Please read my other posts before making assumptions, accusations and generalizations.

A religious defense only helps religious people. Worse though, it perpetuates the idea that certain classes of opinions are more worthy than others.

Clearly secular solutions are more valuable because they help everyone. I'm very tolerant of religious people finding safety under my umbrella even though I find their belief odious.

>A religious defense only helps religious people.

Anyone can claim religious reasons, there is no religion police (yet). To me it reads like she objected for privacy reasons and the religious phrase given is just an argument they think might be accepted more easily. (I might be wrong, but it is a possible scenario.) - (Which is a sad thing in itself.)

Meh. Freedoms are freedoms, and people want them for whatever reason they like. I don't think this really tarnishes anything.

As I alluded to in my other post, I think this is more likely to be successfully combatted as a privacy issue instead of a religious one.

If a vague reference to the "Mark of the Beast" applies to a lanyard, then why isn't my [belief] allow me to get out of [whatever I want].

Courts have often ruled that rights of minors can be restricted in school. Fighting that is enough of an issue to try to get a judgement call on a particular fine point of someone's faith.

(To put it in policy debate terms, there's a more obvious (though still plenty blurry) bright line for privacy violations than there are for individual faith exemptions).

(edit, sorry, to note, I don't disagree with you, but the courts have also placed limitations on "religious freedom" as well. There are lots of things in the [various religious texts] that aren't allowed under US law, regardless of the individual's faith, etc, etc.)

> I think this is more likely to be successfully combatted as a privacy issue instead of a religious one.

The stereotyped view of the US is of a nation gripped by religious fervour with crazies at all levels and branches of legislature and executive and judicial and etc government.

I've seen many things which would have been unthinkable in the US before 9/11 become normal afterwards. I've seen many privacies and freedoms become restricted.

While you fight this on privacy grounds it's useful to have other people fighting this on grounds of religious freedom. It leaves you free to make the arguments that you're comfortable making; that you really believe in, and it provides more people to apply pressure.

I think you didn't finish your first sentence(?) I suspect I disagree with where it was headed but, that's an entirely different conversation and varies depending on how you're affected by it.

Again, I think people are treating me as anti-religious. I seriously just want "privacy" to be the forefront issue. It's much more universal, it's easier to make a brightline ruling on and it's not subject to the muddying of people saying "my religion prohibits me from, paying taxes, doing jury duty, etc, etc".

It would be more interesting and supportable for you. People are different and have different interests and motivation. I'm not making a value judgement here, just pointing out something.

Religion is a very important motivating factor for a large portion of our society. If the pious want to join with the technorati against this for religious reasons, I would welcome them. Religion may not be as influential today as it was in the past, but God-fearing Americans are still a very large and powerful constituency.

Besides, if I'm reading your comment correctly, you're in favor of separation of church and state in public schools -- which is exactly the position taken by the religious protagonist of the article.

>You're in favor of separation of church and state in public schools -- which is exactly the position taken by the religious protagonist of the article.

(Genuinely asking) Is it? I want to be excepted from state policies based on my religion is NOT a well defined right. Again, there are many state/federal laws that contradict many religious texts and supersede them.

> I want to be excepted from state policies based on my religion

It is sort of a gray area. On the one hand, you don't want people to start worshiping the gods of Norevenu and insisting that paying taxes goes against the beliefs of their pantheon so they don't have to do it and the Constitution says they're okay because that's part of their religion.

On the other hand, you don't want politicians to be able to write laws that clearly harass or deny religious freedom to believers.

Where the case in the article falls on that spectrum is open to debate. Some of my personal heuristics for policymaking are:

1. If you do things the way they've always been done before, the risks are more of a known quantity. We should apply a penalty to the score we assign to any policy that involves doing new things, to represent the risks we don't understand.

2. Government often manages to screw things up, so smaller government is usually better. That way if things do get screwed up, at least there's a good chance it'll be on a small scale and/or for a short time. We should apply a penalty to the score we assign to any policy that involves a larger or more intrusive government, to represent the risk of greater inefficiency, corruption, scope creep, and unintended consequences.

3. You should apply a penalty to anything that costs money and a bonus to anything that generates or saves money, if balancing the budget is a concern. Right now, this applies everywhere: At the federal level we're running many deficits, and most state/city/local governments are being squeezed by the recession, declining grants from higher levels, and increasing costs.

All of these heuristics point in the same direction on this one.

Why don't they just track the mobile phones?

I worry about the religious thing. Maybe she really is just that religious. On the other hand maybe claiming religious conflicts is much easier and likely to succeed than trying to argue rationally. And that would be a worrying trend.

A lot of schools don't allow mobile phones...

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